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Brian Schuster

A Dapp is a ‘blockchain enabled’ website, where the Smart Contract is what allows it to connect to the blockchain.

The easiest way to understand this is to understand how traditional websites operate.

The traditional web application uses HTML, CSS and javascript to render a page. It will also need to grab details from a database utilizing an API . When you go onto Facebook, the page will call an API to grab your personal details and display them on the page.

You can think of a website like this:

Front End → API → Database

A Dapp is very similar to a traditional web application. The front end uses the exact same technology to render the page. The one critical difference is that instead of an API connecting to a Database, you have a Smart Contract connecting to a blockchain.

You can think of a Dapp like this:

Front End → Smart Contract → Blockchain

While a simplified version of what’s happening, this does illustrate that Smart Contracts are playing the role of the ‘api connector’ to the blockchain.

I got a chance to see Joseph Lubin speak a week ago in New York. He was asked a question where he got to elaborate on the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum.

I’m paraphrasing, but Bitcoin is specialized to handle a large number of transactions specific to currency exchange. There wasn’t a ‘secondary’ intent, like creating smart contracts, that Bitcoin needed to handle.

Ethereum, on the other hand, was built specifically to handle smart contracts and became ‘less optimized’ for plain and simple currency transactions. ETH needs to handle ‘transaction + contract’ whereas BTC only needs to handle ‘transaction’.

All things being equal, Bitcoin is better at currency transactions and Ethereum is better at executing smart contracts. Joseph believed there was a place for both of these blockchains in the future.

This isn’t science fiction, this is the next phase of Ethereum: the decentralized internet. Services like the Raiden and Swarm are setting the stage for services that can exist without ownership or a centralized source creating a more secure internet.